Winter
by LyssaRosee
Summary: Sam always hated winter.   An eventual seddie but it will take a while.
1. Chapter 1

Disclaimer: I own nothing

This is my very first ever multi-chapter so please be kind J

Sam _hates _the winter, and not because its cold or the dangerous roads or anything like that. She hates it for the death of living things. She's lost too much to winter. Her grandmother who died in January when she was eight, her grandfather a month later. They said he died of a broken heart, which when she was a child she thought sounded terribly beautiful and romantic, and when she was a teenager she thought it was just something people said when a person died (like "I'm so sorry for your loss" or "He's in a better place now"), and now today as a fully grown woman she thinks its terribly true.

Sam is in a new winter at the age of twenty-five, and she is in an ill fitting black dress that she is freezing in because she never seems to be able to dress for the occasion, even the really important ones.

She remembers a time in high school when that would have bothered her. She remembers a time in college when he bothered her. She remembers a time last Tuesday when he kissed her goodbye and then forgot to breathe long enough to say hello again. She remembers that an hour ago she stood in a church in front of all of their family and friends holding an urn. She remembers that just two years before that he had stood in that same spot with her and said "Til death to us part.", which seems like another lie because he's dead but she can still feel him invading every inch of her skin.

She knows they expected her to say something profound or beautiful. She didn't of course because she's nothing if not unpredictable. Jeff loved that about her, but now he doesn't love anything, and that really pisses her off. It pisses her off because she still loves the scent of him that clings to his pillow, and the 'I love you' notes she keeps finding all over the damn house, and the way his dress shoes look all big and masculine lined up next to her little ballet flats by the front door, and the sound of his laughter that keeps ringing in her ears even though nothing is funny anymore. She has to be here with all of these people, still loving all of these stupid things about him and he's off in some afterlife, while she deals with his stupid crying mother who wont just be quiet for a minute.

Honestly she could use some quiet right about now. She always thought grief was like the movies where after the initial rush of loved ones you were left to wallow by yourself for a while. Unfortunately she was wrong, apparently when the love of your life dies young everybody wants a piece of the action. Her best friend moves into her guestroom and her mother-in-law sleeps on the couch for two weeks, until she tells Mrs. Michaels sort of rudely that she needs to shower… at her own place, so his mother does and it seems to remind her that she has a life outside of grief. Sam takes that small victory and sets it aside because she still has a crazy overbearing chick in her guestroom and a seemingly endless stream of family and friends who "just want to see how your holding up" which she soon realizes is code for "just want to insert myself into your heartache because it makes my place in the world feel bigger". So its nearly two months after her world came crashing down before she gets a moment to herself.

Which it turns out is not a good thing because idle hands are what lead her to open his closet and step inside. This closet was his one demand when they were house hunting. He said after a lifetime of living in an apartment with no closets that his first house was going to have a million. He had taken one look at the closet and declared that this was the house for them. She had laughed as he slowly but surely turned his closet into a mini man cave with a flat screen TV at the far end and a small recliner near the door. A huge Sinatra poster hangs over his record player which sits on top of a the large cabinet where all of his records are. Stepping into his little space, being surrounded by his stupid Jeff things, his stupid Jeff scent, his greatest stupid folly, it all just reminded her that he wasn't here anymore and that pissed her off all over again. Which was why she started tearing clothes off the hangers and flipped the chair and ripped the poster and threw the 45 that had been on the needle at the TV. When she was all done she regretted it because she had, in her more dramatic moments of despair, vowed to keep the house as a shrine to his memory right down to the dirty socks under the bed and the sheet music he had been working on spread out in the music room. She looks around for a minute, sitting on the floor, then she stands and walks out, closing the door firmly behind her. She feels pretty tired now so she thinks she'll just go lay down for a while.


	2. Chapter 2

She lays down for three weeks. That was never her intention, it was just that once she laid down, and there was no one there to bother her, there was really no reason to get up. They never gave her a set day to go back to work so its not like she has that to worry about. She answers any calls she gets with a text saying that she's still in need of some space. Sometimes she gets up and drinks some water or something, but food seems to have lost its appeal which would shock her if she could feel anything.

He would be thrown for a loop if he knew that she didn't eat for nearly a month despite the fact that she had a freezer full of homemade ham casseroles and three meat trays in the fridge had actually gone bad. The day they met he had watched in awe as she had inhaled three slices of New York City pizza, unlike other guys she had met he had bee impressed instead of disgusted by it. Now the idea of eating makes her feel sick. What can she say, she's changed.

She likes the idea of changing, of becoming a different version of herself now that he's gone. It almost feels like a way to punish him for leaving her. Like 'Ha look at me now I can evolve and become this totally different person without you. I don't need you I never even did.' She thinks of cutting off her long blonde hair that he loved and quitting her job as the music director for the local high school and becoming an accountant. She would do it to, if she could just get out of bed.


	3. Chapter 3

Its Carly coming over and dragging her into the shower fully dressed that finally gets her out of bed. Sam screams the whole time about how not everybody can just shower their problems away, but Carly just glares and Sam is too weak to overtake her now.

Carly notices how thin she is and calls and orders a pizza while Sam takes a proper clothes free shower. Sam stares disinterestedly at the same meat lovers pizza she previously would have swallowed in two bites for a few minutes before Carly yells at her to eat it. She lifts it to her lips like it weighs a million pounds and takes small nibbling bites while Carly watches.

This continues for two more weeks. Carly giving her step by step instructions on how to get through the day. She gets up at Carly's instruction every morning, puts on whatever clothes Carly lays out, brushes her hair and teeth, picks at whatever food is put in front of her, sits and stares blankly at the T.V. while Carly is on the phone with her office, picks at whatever Carly puts in front of her, watches some more television while Carly works on the computer for a while, takes a shower, puts on pajamas, picks at whatever Carly puts in front of her, hugs Carly goodnight, goes to bed. Repeat for fourteen days.

During that time Sam slips into a kind of deceptive silence during the day. Sam thinks that bothers Carly the most because Sam is never quiet. In nearly twenty years of friendship Carly has only ever seen Sam keep silent for the sake of a prank or theft. Sam breaks the silence a night though. At night she cries and wails like she's been shot. The first night Carly tries to hold her but Sam pushes her away, desperate to be alone in her grief for a little while.

At the end of the two weeks Carly oversleeps. Sam wakes up on her own, gets out of bed, puts on an outfit she chooses by herself, brushes her teeth and hair, starts breakfast, and then goes to wake Carly up. She tries not to notice the look of relief and pride on Carly's face because it makes her feel stupid. Like the fact that she managed to function like a normal human being is such an amazing feat. She's twenty-five and somebody is proud of her for dressing herself, where has her life gone?

After eating the breakfast she prepared Sam moves towards her laptop for the first time in more than three months. Her Facebook is open and she has 194 notifications. She ignores them for the most part because they are largely condolences and she's just not up to that but at the very bottom of the list she sees the candid shot of the two of them on stage mid-song. He had left her a comment the day he died.

Sam stays there for a minute rereading the last comment he had ever posted to her. Just a one liner stating that he would be late coming home. If she remembered how to laugh she would have because he obviously had no idea how late he would be. Instead she shut her Facebook page down and instead logged onto her work e-mail where she read through a few updates from her substitute and the shot off a note to her boss saying that she would be back by next week.

She knows that she should probably give this whole dressing herself thing a few more days, make sure its not a fluke, but its been nearly five months and shes getting sick of herself.

She looks around her living room, one carefully decorated with a perfect combination of his style and hers. She thinks maybe she should redecorate.


	4. Chapter 4

Apparently going back to work was a bit pointless because its already May. The spring concert is over, the musical is putting on its final performance in a few days, and all she really has to do is grade a few finals and clean out what little stuff is still in her office from before she left in December.

Its like an archeological dig through somebody else's life when she clears out her desk. She finds ticket stubs for concert and movies, three separate notes reminding herself to pick up his suit from the cleaners (she wonders if its still there), a shopping list for Jeff's special birthday dinner.

All of these things seemed so wifey. She wasn't a wife anymore though.

She spent a moment thinking about that. She didn't have to be a wife anymore, she didn't _get _to be a wife anymore. She really liked being a wife. She liked knowing that she would be coming home to the same man every night. She had found the stability that her childhood had so lacked, and she loved every minute of her life with him. Everybody had said she was so lucky to have found him so young. Carly had been so envious, saying that Sam got to skip all the awful years of being single and looking for a mate. Now what was she supposed to do? She couldn't count on Carly to keep her company for the rest of her life. Carly had been dating a wonderful man named Jim for more than a year now and Sam was sure he would propose soon. She would be _alone._

Sam hadn't been ever really been alone before. Growing up she always had somebody. Melanie, Carly, and even Freddie. She looks back on her life and she realizes that only for the three months between leaving for college and meeting Jeff was she alone. She regrets not being alone because now shes worried that she wont know how to and shes too old to learn.

As the panic starts to set in she begins to imagine herself with a thousand cats.


	5. Chapter 5

She has the perfect solution to learning to be alone.

She's going to do an immersion course just like Freddie had done their freshmen year of college when he spent a semester in France. Of course that was also right around the time he fell off everybody's radars but Sam was choosing to gloss over that fact.

When she gets home she makes herself a vodka tonic and waits for Carly to get off the phone with Jim. After handing Carly a Sidecar she drops the bomb.

"When school ends for the year I'm going to leave for a the rest of the summer. I think that I need to learn to be by myself and I think to do that I have to stop using you as a crutch. You wont be around to wipe my nose forever so I have to learn or Ill end up as a crazy cat lady. I'm going to take some of Jeff's life insurance and rent a house on the shore for the summer."

Sam says all of this in a rush and waits for Carly to respond. Carly looks at her for a second, downs her drink, and puts on her best smile.

"That sounds wonderful Samantha."

Sam cringes, if Carly is using her full name then she must be mad.

"Really?'

"Well no not really but considering this is the first decision you've made in months that is more serious than what you should wear I'm going to go ahead and support it."

So that's how Sam's life goes from zero to sixty. One day she is a motionless widow, the next she is a tornado of vacation plans.


	6. Chapter 6

Nearly six months after her world ended Samantha Caroline Puckett-Michaels arrived at what she hoped would be her salvation.

Her salvation needed a coat of paint.

The quaint little house on the shore of a barely there town in North Carolina was costing her a grand total of two thousand dollars for three months and she was more than glad to paint it, if it did the job she was asking of it.

She just wanted to not be so afraid anymore. She wanted the deep winter that seemed to have settled in her bones to thaw. She wanted to feel alive again.

That of course brought its own set of guilt, about being alive when Jeff wasn't, but she hoped that maybe this time away would help that a bit too.

She sat in her Jeep for a good twenty minutes, mentally psyching herself up for unpacking, when her phone buzzed.

_Good luck._

_-Carly_

_Sam smiled softly and began the task of unloading her clothes, new bedding, cleaning supplies, books, electronics, and the few groceries she had packed. She was planning on staying for just under twelve weeks and it shocked her how much she had deemed "absolutely necessary". _

_After two hours of putting things away and pouring herself a big glass of wine Sam sits on the back porch and decides to not think for a little bit._

_This lasts for about five minutes._

_She starts thinking of all the things she never did, whether it was with Jeff or alone, and it stars to bother her. Some things are so simple, like going out to a restaurant alone or singing drunk karaoke._

_She cant help but think that her sixteen year old self would be really livid if she could see how things turned out. She would be mad that she ended up the kind of woman who didn't know how to go to the movies alone, the type of woman who had made herself dependent on a man. Her younger self had watched her mother put all her stock into what a man thought of her or only being happy if she wasn't alone and vowed to never be that way. So much for that plan._


End file.
